Monday, July 14

The following morning, Monday, I met Shirley and Liu. Shirley works in the Shanghai USDEC office and was my email contact during the months before the trip. We sat in the lobby of the hotel and for two hours, I gave the lecture while Liu translated. Liu, or more properly described, “Dr. Liu”, who has a PhD from the Department of Food Science, Washington University in Pullman Oregon (wrong). She now teaches at the Food Science department at xxx university in Wuxi, China, about an hour away from Shanghai.

We went out to lunch next door, in a very nice restaurant. I don’t have pictures of this meal, but the highlights was a pyramid of with four layers of seaweek, several colors of green and yellow. And little durian mice, stinky on the inside and crispy on the outside, Durian, as you may know, snuck onto the ark when no-one was looking. It is truly foul smelling—somewhere between dog excrement and vomit. Both, actually. When baked, the flavor is “special” and one gets hooked on it over time.

After lunch, we took the elevator into the bowels of the hotel, where we prepared the pastries and breads for the next day’s presentation. We walked down long corridors lined with paintings straight out of kindergarten exhorting the workers who were pictured as round faced nebbishes lacking facial features save big smiles, each wearing a different uniform corresponding to their particular task. Each painting, about 4 feet high and 20 feet long, exhorted the staff to practice Courtesy, Honesty and a myriad other desirable behaviors. JW Marriott paternalism.

The bakery was small and very crowded. Liu and I worked together. The head baker (Peter?) was extremely accommodating and assigned us our very own assistant. He started by weighing out the control recipe of White Pan Bread. I put the ingredients into the KitchenAid and after 2 minutes of mixing, the mixer broke. From then on, I was obliged to mix everything by hand: doughs for White Pan Bread, croissants, doughnuts, and pie dough. We worked from 2:30 PM until 8 PM. Sometime in the middle of our culinary adventure, the chef stopped by. He was wearing a pitch-black uniform. Only time I’ve ever seen that. He looked me up and down, the corner of his mouth sneering Dick Cheney style. He said, “You know, we have sanitary standards to uphold at this hotel.” (I was wearing a t-shirt and old pants). He then made some statement about how the “agreement” was that we’d only be using the kitchen for 4 hours the first day and just finishing up the second. He embodied the warmth of Madame LaFarge and the sensitivity of Benito Mussolini. After he left, the head baker assured us that we were welcome and that we were his guests and that if we needed the bakery a little longer, that he would do everything he could to help us accomplish our task.

We were able to bake three versions of the bread, make three versions of croissant dough, two versions of apple pie with streusel topping, and three versions of doughnuts. At the end of the day, we were well positioned to finish the task the following morning.

Shirley, Fiona, Liu, and I walked a couple blocks to a Sichuan restaurant. They ordered a vast quantity of food, all of it pretty highly spiced. The most memorable dishes for me were: an enormous bowl of soup containing freshwater fish fillets cooked with 4 cups of hot chilies that were scooped out before we could enjoy the blazingly spiced soup. Another dish of note was the beef tendons--tender and beautifully flavored of course with ginger and garlic. A third dish was rice paddy eels, which were batter-coated, fried, then tossed in a lovely orange-scented sauce. Crunchy and moist. Fantastic.